Hermen Hulst Allegedly Said Sony’s PC Ports Didn’t Make Enough Money – Push Square

Sony has apparently decided to cease porting its first-party single player PS5 games to PC, and one of the reasons is because they weren’t making much money.

It’s always been assumed that sales of the conversions slowed considerably once the novelty wore off, with early endeavours like Horizon Zero Dawn and Days Gone selling extremely well, before sequels like God of War Ragnarok and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 petered off.

While we don’t have any official data, trends can be observed through concurrent player numbers, and analytics firm Alinea put out some estimates late last year which seemed to reflect this fact.

Following wishy-washy comments from PlayStation CEO Hideaki Nishino earlier this week, which failed to really clarify Sony’s approach, Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier commented on ResetEra about the firm’s changing strategy.

And within that statement, he said that PS Studios boss Hermen Hulst told staff the ports simply weren’t making enough revenue:

“During a townhall a few weeks ago, Hermen Hulst told staff that their single player narrative games will be PlayStation only, and he explained that they were inconsistent with their PC releases, they didn’t make enough money, and they want to keep their IP aligned to their own platform. Confirmed this with two people who heard him say it.”

From what I’ve observed, this has divided opinion.

Looking at polls we’ve conducted on the topic, it seems most PS5 fans here think Sony’s time and energy should be devoted to its own platform.

That’s kinda what Nishino said in the aforementioned interview: that the company wants to “enhance the unique value of the gameplay experience that can be delivered on PlayStation”.

But PC players argue this was a self-fulfilling prophecy, as many of the ports launched in a sub-optimal state, late, and at high price points. The argument here is: if the games arrived day-and-date in better condition, they would have sold.

Looking at the financial data, though, I don’t think this was a direction Sony wanted to go.

Yes, it could have sold more copies of its games on PC with more investment and day-and-date releases, but it makes the majority of its money off its own ecosystem. Clearly it believes that bringing those games day-and-date to storefronts like Steam would have substantially impacted sales of its own console.

So here we are. I think Sony thought porting its games to PC would have extended the lifecycle of the software, and earned it new fans it could potentially pull back to PlayStation. The juice seemingly wasn’t worth the squeeze, though, and it’s changing tact as a consequence.